When I had my first academic job, new staff spent a couple of days of induction learning about how to teach. On the afternoon of the last day, which was the Friday before teaching started, the course tutor asked if there was anything he hadn’t covered which we would like to learn about.

A colleague said he had 150 first year engineering students on Monday. I laughed. The course tutor laughed. Nobody else laughed. The tutor explained to the other academics, mainly from the humanities, that engineering students, at least in Ireland, are a notorious shower of animals, liable to throw things at the lecturer, including, on one occasion, a frozen chicken.

It is hard to take too seriously talk of a crisis in Britain when even by the narrowest definition of the humanities the absolute number of humanities students has increased fivefold since 1967, and by the broader definition almost 10-fold.

In the US, over a period of much slower expansion, their numbers have still doubled…Talk of a crisis triggered by a decline in a percentage point or two does seem like an over-reaction that is likely to contribute to rather than ameliorate the alleged problem.

As well as looking at student numbers, we can look at the UK data for academic staff numbers, as a proxy for resource allocation.

The figure shows the percentage of academic staff in STE (Science, Technology, and Engineering), Humanities (shown dashed), and Medicine from 1994 to 2008, using the freely available HESA data sets. The break in the curves corresponds to a change in the reporting of data. The details of how staff numbers were assigned to the three categories are given in a separate PDF.

The first part of the plot shows a drop in the percentage of STE staff, which might correspond to the closure of Chemistry departments over that time (the data for these years are not broken down to subject level), while Medicine rises, and Humanities are fairly steady.

After the change in reporting methodology in 2003, Medicine has about the same proportion of staff as before the change, while Humanities increases markedly and STE reduces. Clearly, this is an artifact of the breakdown of data and does not indicate real changes in the proportion of academic staff in STE or Humanities. The trends from 2003 onwards are validly indicated, however, and show STE and Humanities holding more or less steady.

In summary, the data from 1994 onwards show a sharp drop in STE, a rise in Medicine, and a small drop in Humanities.

“What has changed radically in the last 10 years is that they’re trying to turn everything into a for-profit business,” said Churchwell. “And that’s bullshit. Universities are not for profit. We are charitable institutions. What they’re now doing is saying to academics: ‘You have to be the fundraisers, the managers, the producers, you have to generate the incomes that will keep your institutions afloat.’ Is that really what society wants – for everything to become a marketplace, for everything to become a commodity? Maybe I’m just out of step with the world, but what some of us are fighting for is the principle that not everything that is valuable can or should be monetised. That universities are one of the custodians of centuries of knowledge, curiosity, inspiration. That education is not a commodity, it’s a qualitative transformation. You can’t sell it. You can’t simply transfer it.”

Churchwell is right: education is not a commodity and should not be monetized, and universities are “custodians of centuries of knowledge, curiosity, inspiration” (letting pass what Paulo Freire might have made of such a concept of learning). It can surely be agreed that universities are, in Stefan Collini’s words, places where things are studied for their own sake and that the value of education is not monetary, whether to the student or to an economy, that education needs no market justification because it is a good thing for people to be educated and for there to be places where disciplines can be pursued for their own intrinsic worth. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a set of brief notes which I issued to engineering students on a now defunct degree, as part of a class on the social context of engineering. This is converted from a LaTeX file which accounts for the lack of direct links to references.

Chips and ships …

At the end of the eighteenth century, workers in the naval shipyards of London were paid, if they were lucky, twice a year. Their wages were subject to various deductions for on-site services (the resident surgeon was paid from the men’s wages) and for disciplinary offences (football, cricket, absence from roll calls). Furthermore, wages were often not paid at all—in 1767, wages were fifteen months behind—and since sacked workers did not receive their back pay, there was little incentive to strike (The material on the London shipyards is taken from Linebaugh, 2003).

This is not a textbook and should not be read as one. It is a set of notes written for a final year unit at the University of Bath, with the aim of introducing aerospace engineering students to the extra concepts, mainly mathematical, which they will need in order to be able to read research papers in turbulence and noise. These papers are a mixture of classic work, such as Lighthill’s analysis of aerodynamically-generated noise, and more recent studies which apply state-of-the-art techniques to hard problems, and either extend our understanding of the physics, or give us completely new insights, in a way not previously possible.

The notes are written fairly informally, to give some intuitive sense of the concepts, as an aid to getting started on the real thing. Having read about correlation functions, for example, you will be in a position to read a paper which makes use of them, but that does not mean you will find it easy. You will find it possible, and the more papers you read, the deeper the understanding you will develop as you see how different people have made use of the same techniques. In practice, any writing of substance will require multiple readings, and will reveal more of itself under each reading.

Turbulence and acoustics are difficult, and you will not master them on this unit. You will have to work hard on ideas which will not be obvious, and were not obvious to the smart people who developed them. You will often feel stupid and confused, and you will wonder why you are doing this. You are doing this because it is worth it: you are taking on a difficult topic which some of the brightest people in history have found hard, but have nonetheless been able to contribute to.

Feeling stupid means you are working on something worth the trouble: if you want to feel clever, watch Sesame Street or read the Daily Mail.